Traditional-style roguelike Caves of Qud has a big new patch coming tomorrow, September 28th, that overhauls Chimera-type mutants and introduces some elements of its user interface overhaul. The big change is that Chimeric mutants, restricted to physical mutations, can now randomly grow new body parts when they mutate further. So you can grow more arms, or legs, or torsos, or heads, or any other weird part in the game's library of body parts, including everything from plant roots and fungus gills to wings.
This means that you can have, say, 12 arms wielding 12 axes and dismembering 12 enemy limbs each round. Or three sets of arms, each wielding a flamethrower that you're wearing on each of your three torsos.
I say 12 arms because you can start with one extra set of arms, and you can get a second set of arms through a mechanical backpack, and then you can get 10 or so mutations over the course of the game which is as many as 10 more arms. So that's start with access to six arms and then you just gotta pick up six more arms! Easy!
The update also implements the first round of Qud's new user interface improvements, styled to be more like a modern RPG and less like a game subject to the limitations of MS-DOS era interfaces. It'll hopefully go a long way towards making the game less alienating for new players. Scope the new conversation screen above.
There are also a lot of other strange new updates to other mutations coming, as hinted in these screenshots posted to the Freehold Games twitter account:
I'm not entirely sure how to explain Caves of Qud if you don't know what it is. Actually wait, no, it's a dungeon crawler set in so far a future that the science is magic and almost everyone is a weird mutant, and if you're not a weird mutant, you're a weird pure-strain human cyborg thing. It's also a work of fascinating, beautiful narrative complexity, with a detailed story that's part hand-written, part procedurally generated, and all awe-inspiring. It's one of our top 100 games on the PC, where we said that it's "A dark horse if there ever was one, Caves of Qud is the best RPG you're not playing."
This has been a year of big updates for Qud, with the sprawling Tomb of the Eaters dungeon getting added just a few months ago. Mutations have been getting steadily revamped since, but mostly on the beta branch of the game. This patch will bring all those changes into one big overhaul. You can find Caves of Qud on its official website, as well as on Steam, GOG, and itch.io for $15.
